wetranscripts | Entries tagged with subplots

Writing Excuses 12.41: Raising the Stakes

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/10/08/12-41-raising-the-stakes/

Key Points: Raising the stakes over the long haul? How do you keep it interesting? Lots of smaller plots, smaller scenes that raise the stakes in different ways. Subplots! Make the failure worse, and worse. Mounting consequences! Put yourself into it. Find the personal issues for the character. More specific, and more personal. Use try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, and build new problems out of old solutions. Rest points can accent the pedal-to-the-metal moments, if they are real. Build a stairway, always up and progressing, but there are plateaus as well as risers. The question raised at the beginning must matter, it must be gripping, then the stakes will carry you. Don't raise the stakes too fast and too high! Save your great finish for the end, don't give it away too early. Also, delayed consequences, or solutions that postpone the problem without solving it may work for you.
( Raise the stakes? Bet on it! )

[Brandon] This has been a great discussion. I'm going to have to call it here. But I do have some homework for you guys. I want you to try a few of the things that we've talked about in this episode. Specifically, raising the stakes, number one, by making… Try taking a side character from a story you're working on, and raise the stakes for what's going on for them. I want you to try by making it more personal first, but I'm not going to let you use the crutch that a lot of us use, that they have lost someone in their past or that it's personal because this is the person that killed their mentor or something like that. It can't be related to the loss of a loved one.
[Mary] No fridging!
[Brandon] Yes. Just make that one not on the table, and just see what you can do with that then. And then make it more specific. Try to make it a little less epic, but more specific to the person. Try that. Try that instead. See if this raises the stakes for you in interesting ways for your story. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.37: Subplots

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/09/10/12-37-subplots/

Key points: Subplots usually carry less emotional weight. The subplot's inciting incident starts after the main plot inciting incident. Subplots often are related to the main plot in some way. Sometimes the real emotional resonance is in the subplots. But beware of subplots that lead the reader too far from the main plot. The main plot needs to move forward. Subplots should be in service to the larger story. Sometimes you can spin a subplot that isn't needed off into a separate short story. Subplots don't necessarily have to be related to the main plot, but they should intersect. So look for the intersections that are interesting, that complicate or change the story. How can a subplot change the character's plans? How can the subplot support the main plot? Using MACE, try to look for a subplot that is in a different category from your main plot, to get interesting intersections. If you can remove the entire subplot and it doesn't affect the story, then the subplot doesn't belong there. Although it may illuminate the character or world... Subplots let you pull solutions for problems from them. Beware of having it be too convenient! Do side characters need a subplot fo their own? Not necessarily, although it is one way to flesh out a character. But sometimes, you just let them achieve goals offstage.

( A plot, B plot... Save the cat! )

[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and get some homework.
[Wesley] Okay. So, your homework for the week is, let's say that four major things will drive a story. They are environment, characters, disruption of the status quo, and questions. Take a piece, look at your main plot, and decide which of these main four things it is. Then ask which of the remaining three things can go wrong. Make one of them your subplot.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go right.

[Brandon] So, listeners. I used the word gypped in this podcast. It's a word I've been trying to eliminate from my vocabulary. We thought rather than just cutting it out, I would put this little thing on here. This is one of those words that wiggles its way into your dialogue which you don't realize it is deeply offensive to people. So I want to apologize to the Roma people who might be listening. I'm trying to get rid of it. If those who don't know, it actually means Gypsy ripping off, because Gypsies were seen as people who would rip you off. It is an offensive racial stereotype. So, I apologize for using that. I thank you guys for continuing to listen even through the mistakes that we occasionally make.

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Writing Excuses 11.38: The Elemental Relationship As a Sub-Genre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/09/18/11-38-the-elemental-relationship-as-a-sub-genre/

Key Points: Relationship is often the number two thing in a book. Often the main plot, the driver, is another elemental genre, but relationship adds, either throughout the book or in smaller sections. Relationship often helps make a main character more sympathetic. How do you add relationship without letting it take over? What's the driver? Use that to push evolution in the relationship, without making relationship the main problem. Think about where you spend your words -- the problem with the most words is the most important one! Often there are true hybrids. Often just use relationship as a seasoning, with moments where characters stand in support of each other, or reveal a shared history. Suggest a relationship, and let the reader tell their own story about it. Subplots need to evolve, with the reader interested in how it is going to develop. Seasoning can be fine, too.

( Who's driving, anyway? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to give us some homework. My suggestion to you for homework is that two weeks ago, if you did what Dan told you, you took a romantic comedy and you highlighted the beats of this romantic comedy. I want you to take that outline that you've done, and if you didn't do it, go do it. I want you to change it into a different kind of relationship. I want you to take these same beats and say, "All right. Now it's mentor student. And I'm going to build the same story around this, but with this very different relationship." Or I'm going to be buddy cop, or I'm going to be mother-daughter, or I'm going to be whatever. Take this, take the same beats, and transition it to a new type of relationship.
[Howard] So you take the beat map from While You Were Sleeping and write Lethal Weapon with it.
[Brandon] That's right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: sidebar

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Writing Excuses 11.30: Elemental Thriller Q&A

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/07/24/11-30-elemental-thriller-qa/

Q&A Summary
Q: How do I build tension consistently through my story? As opposed to having little batches of it here and there?
A: Shorten sequel time, or overlap it with another piece of action. Raise stakes consistently. Set the stakes in the beginning, then just remind us of them.
Q: What are some disadvantages of thriller pacing?
A: Fatigue. May have ramped up the tension so high that character moments are difficult. Beware not having a payoff for the level of tension you've created.
Q: What are advantages of a thriller? Why would you write on, or inject it?
A: Keep the reader reading! Draw the reader deeper into the story.
Q: How do you keep tension in dialogue and beats, movement beats, instead of just having things explode all the time?
A: Keep your dialogue snappy. Raise the stakes behind the dialogue.
Q: When don't you use a cliffhanger?
A: When you don't have a good payoff. There are different kinds of cliffhangers, surprise and wonder, or what's coming next.
Q: When you write a scene from a thriller, do you ever imagine how it would play out in a movie?
A: Yes.
Q: How much thriller is too much before it changes your genre?
A: Which part is set dressing, and which is elemental genre (emotion)? What promises do you want to make to your reader? What excites you? If the thrill overpowers the other emotion you were trying to evoke, then you've used too much.
Q: What do you do when the tension in your story has peaked too early? How do I escape from the thrill I have inadvertently created?
A: Revision. Take your stakes, spread them out. Do a beat chart and see what you need to do. Consider adding a subplot.
( What if you had one more question? )

[Howard] Yep. We are about halfway through our year of elemental genre. So what we want to do is start putting these things together, using thriller as well, in this case, kind of as a pacing element. I talked about a beat chart earlier. Sit down with your manuscript or with your outline, and in the margins, write at each point what the emotion is that you are trying to evoke from the reader. Are you trying to evoke anxiety? Are you trying to evoke joy? Are you trying to evoke laughter? Is it action, is it wonder? Make these visible notes, underlined. Then sit back and look at the manuscript and see where the spaces are. See where things are really close together. The conclusion here is you're going to learn something about your manuscript. I don't know what it is.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] But it should be exciting and thrilling. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: frivolous

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Writing Excuses 11.26: Elemental Mystery Q&A

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/06/26/11-26-elemental-mystery-qa/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you balance between two mysteries in the same story? Should you even try?
A: Yes. Especially small mysteries. A plot, B plot. Be aware of when you open and close each one, and the proportion of time spent on each. Sequential, with the answer to the first mystery introducing the real problem.
Q: What types of mysteries can fit as subplots? For example, when does a murder work as a subplot rather than as a main plot?
A: Any mystery can be a subplot, just set the scope and number of clues. A subplot find the murderer can heighten tension and build characters. Make sure your murder is a complication, that it changes things for the characters.
Q: When the beta readers all figure out the mystery too early, how can I tweak it so that my readers won't have the same experience as my beta readers?
A: Ask the beta readers what tipped them off, then take that out. All mysteries in first draft are either too obtuse or too obvious, and you have to add and remove to get it right. A good red herring that gets pulled out from under everyone helps.
Q: In terms of the MICE quotient, do all mystery plots have to be idea based?
A: Yes.
Q: How do you write a protagonist that is smarter than yourself?
A: Use revision, young writer! Accelerated thinking through rewriting. Jump to a conclusion, then explain the process of thought and clues -- it was not a guess! Extra mysteries with quick solutions to show how smart we are.
Q: So you've made your protagonist really smart, smarter than the average reader and the other characters. How do you still have it be a struggle for them to solve the mystery without losing people or ruining the story just by having it all internal inside of the protagonist's head?
A: Let them make mistakes. Use red herrings that mislead them, too. Make the cost of being wrong really steep. Lack of resources, or other kinds of obstacles.
Q: How do you keep a kidnapping victim from just being a MacGuffin if they aren't recovered until the end of the story?
A: Given them a point of view, and agency through trying to rescue themselves.
Q: How intellectually stimulating can you make a genre mystery? How literary or serious can it be?
A: There's what's happening (the story) and how you tell it. These are not intrinsically related! You can tell any story with any method. Genre, especially elemental genre, does not dictate method of writing.
( All the questions... and answers, too! )

[Brandon] So, your homework. I've got your homework this time. One of the things when we were discussing these episodes we realized is mysteries are embedded so much in our stories. There are often so many of them, a surprising number. So I would like you to take a book or film that you enjoy and just jot down every mystery you can see. From who drank my milk to who killed this person or how does the magic work. Whatever it is, write down every one, and you'll start to see that the curiosity of solving a mystery is integral to almost every story that's been written. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: prickly

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Writing Excuses 11.8: Wonder As a Subgenre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/02/21/11-08-wonder-as-a-subgenre/

Key points: Wonder as subplot. Often the first half is exploring amazing, wonderful new things, while the main plot is building for the second half. Mash up waiting for the next wonder with something else. Put awesome things in! Make a list, order them, and write. Beware taking them out of order, kung fu on a train goes before the nuclear explosion, not afterwards. Use set pieces, major scenes. Make your buildup fit. Foreshadowing is important. Sense of wonder, strangeness, newness, and reactions. Make sure the character can be awed -- sometimes a naive viewpoint character can help (eh, Watson?). But when Sherlock is surprised, you know it is amazing. Don't just do set pieces, fill in the corners with amazing candy wrappers, too. Even small moments of wonder can be very useful. Build the progression -- something new, something strange and unexpected, and then amazement. Booger-flavored candy? Consider timebombs, plot tokens that foreshadow you've got this many coming. Apprentice plot, travelogue, whenever you set up promises of wonders to come and then pay them off, it can be good. Be careful that your subgenre doesn't take over the story, though. Use little pockets, layers, flourishes of wonder, not a distraction but an accent, just an Easter egg for the reader to enjoy now and then.

( A drop of sunshine, a sparkle of dew, a firework display, bright and shiny! )
[Brandon] We actually are out of time on this. This has been a fantastic podcast. But we're actually going to give you some homework.
[Dan] All right. Your homework this week is that we want you to do this. We want you to actually take a story that you're working on, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a sense of wonder, and apply a sense of wonder to some aspect of it. Somebody walks into a room and sees something amazing. Or walks out into the city street and sees something amazing. Write a paragraph or two where your character experiences a sense of wonder.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: smeegles

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Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/17/11-03-layering-the-elemental-genres/

Key points: Borrow elemental genres (ideas, emotions) from other stories and inject them into your stories as subplots, character arcs, or mashups. Layer your elemental genres to create sequels that are the same, but different. Let each character's arc be a different elemental genre. You can use design elements, set dressing, to keep the story together, and mix-and-match elemental genres underneath that to tell different stories. Check your underpinnings -- what is the feeling you like? Drill down into the elemental genre behind the design elements. Turn your wall into a trench, or darkness, or... with a great unknown hidden behind it.

( Is there icing in between the layers? )
[Brandon] We're going to leave you with some homework. Mary's got the homework for us, and it relates to the homework we gave you last time.
[Mary] All right. So last time we asked you to identify the major driving emotion of the story that you are interested in working on. What I want you to do now is I want you to think of a contrasting emotion. So essentially what you're doing is you're creating a foil plot, a foil emotion for your primary emotion. Because this is going to allow you to showcase ever... Or do a contrast between the darkness of one and the happy emotions of the other. So think about not the design elements, but think about the emotional elements and think about... You don't have to worry about our proprietary vocabulary yet. I just want you to identify the emotion that you want to elicit in yourself if you were hacking your brain.
[Brandon] Now by this point, we will have all 11 of the ideas we've come up with put on our website and we will post them such... We will put them in a place that they are easy to find each week, if you want to come glance over them again. As you can tell from this episode, we're still getting used to this terminology ourselves.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Hopefully, across the course of the year, we'll all start really using the same terminology. This is the purpose...
[Howard] I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say that by the end of the season, we will have altered some of the terminology and changed the list, because it just makes more sense.
[Mary] Yep. You guys will probably be better versed in it that we will, because we just talked about it once.
[Brandon] All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: let them eat cake!

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Writing Excuses 7.11: More Microcasting

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/03/11/writing-excuses-7-11-more-microcasting/

Key Points:

1. Should you mix genres or not?
2. How do you avoid world builder's disease?
3. Tips for nanowrimo?
4. Before getting published, how do you get followers to your website or blog?
5. How do you create subplots?
6. What did you learn last year?
7. How do you stay motivated?
( microcasting is like miniature incantations? )
[Brandon] So it was Bill Housely on twitter. He says, "A lone woman who runs an orbital refueling port makes first contact when some desperate aliens stop by for fuel."
[Dan] Awesome.
[Brandon] That's a great writing prompt.
[Dan] Bill Housely, you're our favorite listener, today.
[Brandon] So that's your writing prompt. Go for it. Thank you all. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: millicasting?

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 23: How to Write without Twists

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-23-how-to-write-without-twists/

Key points: Simple surprises and obstacles are not plot twists. Watching engaging characters overcome real problems is satisfying. Watching characters make progress is satisfying. Stories without twists often have strong setups with very clear conflicts and high stakes. Even stories with major plot twists often have straight-forward subplots.
( The Peppermint Twist? )
[Brandon] Let's do a writing prompt before this spirals completely into insanity.
[Jordo] Is it going to be Jane Austen and Diehard?
[Brandon] No.
[Dan] No?
[Howard] It can't be Pride and Prejudice and zombies, either, because that's been done.
[Dan] It's going to be Sense and Sensibility and terrorists.
[Brandon] You have lots of excuses why you are not going to write, but we're going to pretend you don't. Thanks for listening. This has been Writing Excuses.

Current Mood: breezy

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 12: Subplots

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/08/16/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-12-subplots/

Key points: Subplots are secondary plots. They can flesh out other characters, make the world feel more real, keep the tension high, and introduce elements as foreshadowing for the main plot. They can also provide quick accomplishments for a sense of progress. Be wary of subplots being more interesting than the main plot. How many subplots? It depends on your genre and skills, but don't overload the reader. Subplots feel real when they advance character, the main plot, or reveal setting.
( plenty of words about subplots )
[Dan] Here's our writing prompt. By odd happenstance, Brandon and I are wearing the same T-shirt today. Well, two different instances of a similar T-shirt.
[Howard -- choked laughter] Thank you.
[Dan] It is from an explosives company. We all know why we are both wearing the same T-shirt, but your prompt is to write a story about why we are wearing an explosives and blasting T-shirt.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: secondary

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with subplots

Writing Excuses 12.41: Raising the Stakes

Writing Excuses 12.37: Subplots

Writing Excuses 11.38: The Elemental Relationship As a Sub-Genre

Writing Excuses 11.30: Elemental Thriller Q&A

Writing Excuses 11.26: Elemental Mystery Q&A

Writing Excuses 11.8: Wonder As a Subgenre

Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

Writing Excuses 7.11: More Microcasting

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 23: How to Write without Twists

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 12: Subplots

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July 2025

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